Applications are changing the industry as carriers and handset manufacturers, both, are seeking partnerships with application and content providers to differentiate their products and services. For the network, this can only mean more signaling and bandwidth challenges, on top of the unsolved problems of today. The 4G/LTE network roll out is expected to help with added bandwidth, but it may lead users to use more data neutralizing that benefit. For signaling, 4G/LTE won't be a fix for a number of reasons including the flat network design and the fact that the only devices on a 4G network are Smart phones.
Wireless carriers/providers are excited about the benefits of LTE. These include better usage of the available spectrum, faster data rates, reduced latency, lower per-gigabyte transport costs and simpler network architecture. LTE opens the door for amazing new applications and a richer user experience, but will it solve the network congestion problem or make it worse? What about signaling? While LTE removes some of the bottlenecks in the network, the most immediate benefits could be eclipsed by other challenges such as the signaling storm that is looming over wireless networks across the globe.
LTE generally comes with a simpler IP network, flattens the radio network architecture and eliminates the node traditionally equivalent to the Radio Network Controller (RNC) in the radio network hierarchy. This, in turn, increases the signaling load on the other components, which will have to be scaled accordingly. Second, today's 3G networks have a mixture of smart phones and feature phones. LTE however, will be near 100 percent smart phones and as a result, the signaling load will be immediately higher because of the always-on nature of smart phone applications. Further, carriers will adopt to move to LTE and thus, resulting in more data traffic. Carrier/providers will need to rebalance network resources that have traditionally been balanced to carry voice and messaging and only a small amount of data. As reported, there is an increase of signaling load coming with LTE, but overall, this has more to do with the nature of the traffic, applications and services that are now enabled by LTE than the LTE technology itself.
With a mass migration from a wired world to everything mobile at the forefront of the industry and the network, traffic optimization continues to be a critical part of keeping network performance and user satisfaction high.